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hey ^^

the character transfers are still not available in my account page and i cannot post in the gameforums due to missing sub, so let me ask here, is there anything new to the character transfer service, that was promised a year ago ?

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Character transfers are a puzzling topic.

I'm in the dark why EA didn't just hire someone to manually do each copy request as they came. Even if EA payed them $30 bucks an hour to manually move each character, they still would have made a profit. Not to mention all the customer satisfaction they would have gotten, which is worth far more in the long run.

Even if a transfer operator just copied characters using floppy disks, that would still be far better than offering no transfer service at all. Even if the operator had to format the data on the new server manually, it still would have been beneficial at $10-$15 per transfer.

Not as a permanent solution, but temporary, until an automated system was up and running. Surely one of the people that EA fired last year was good with computers, and knew (or could learn) SQL, or whatever infrastructure they use to store character information. Character info could even be stored in a generic file per character .. someone could have learned how to do manual transfers while EA got their early released game functional.

EA just seems to lack the ability to see long term goals and profits. This is just one example, there are many more.

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Karteli, if you assume it takes about 10 minutes to manually transfer a players charcter and gear; It would take a trained staff 12 business days to transfer 10,000 charcters.

When SWTOR had 500,000 + people clamoring for transfers, it is just logistically impossible to meet the demand, no matter how fiscally attractive without a high degree of automation.

When WoW began transfers, there wasn't much demand for it. SWTOR on the other hand, a different story.

They were able to do the merges because it was just every charcter on the server whosale dumped onto another.

I'm not sure how they did the APAC transfers, nor why the process can't be better automated, but manual transfer is not a viable option.

Caveat - I would think.

Sure, a backorder might exist. But that would only give indication to EA that this is where their personell's time should be spent instead of firing them.

Retraining their people into new jobs would have been beneficial is all I was saying. On the long term, getting an automated service to transfer characters would have been also beneficial, for players and EA. But you have to make do with demands as they arise, not ignore them.

And there is still not an automated service in place. In was only because of bad press (really over the past 1/2 year majorly, lesser before that) that even the PTR is starting to get transfers. Prior to PTR transfers, nobody would play the PTR except select SWTOR "guilds", who were trophied by EA, but never revealed and they live in their anonymity (and bugs would go live every patch). I'd say they never existed, but that's just me.